In Utter Darkness
by An Unknown
Summary: For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die / His second, final death in good company.


_**A/N: I'm honestly not sure quite what to make of this. I received a request for an actual 'happy ending' for Harry, and I at least think this qualifies. It takes place sometime during Deathly Hallows when Harry and Hermione have been abandoned and are doing their best to just stay alive. Harry's nightmare is actually quite similar to one I've had myself at one time and another, and the exchange with Hermione about Aristotle's Physics is very much based on a conversation I once had with a friend. The poor fellow made an offhand reference to he-knew-not-what and I immediately blurted out the reference in Cicero's De Officiis. Not my smoothest moment. But really, what were you expecting from a stuffy old academic? At any rate, I hope you enjoy this tale, despite some of its strange little excursions into wrestling with existential questions. Oh, yes. I don't own Harry Potter, don't want to own it, and don't want to make any money off of this. Please don't sue me. And please don't sue me for the numerous quotations; all are in public domain in the States. (Incidentally, if any of you chaps can tell me where they all come from without looking it up, I'll be most impressed). PAXDEITECVM.**_

It was a dark and stormy night. Hermione sat outside the tent, shivering in the cold, using her magic to keep the worst of the sleet off her back. The locket around her neck was even more bone-achingly cold than the freezing rain and slush around her. She could hear the now-familiar voices it put in her head, whispering just too softly to be heard, in tones dark and ominous. She knew from experience that as time went by they would grow gradually more audible until at last the words, 'Despair and die', could be made out.

Growing angry, she ripped it from her neck and threw it into the embers of the small campfire Harry had built earlier in the evening. All at once, she became much warmer, and without the locket to weigh her down, her spell keeping the sleet off her back became much more effective. More importantly, though, she could hear again; when the locket was around her neck she could hear only the loudest sounds over its constant whispers. Harry, who was supposed to be sleeping soundly in the tent behind her in preparation for his watch, was evidently making some kind of whimpering noise.

In truth, keeping watch was slightly redundant. Hermione knew that her concealing spells would hold up under the very greatest scrutiny. And more importantly, she knew that if they did not, the warning provided by keeping watch would do neither her nor Harry any particular good. There was, thus, no reason why Hermione should not leave her station to investigate, and although she was much, much warmer without the locket, the chance to get in out of the wind and rain was a welcome thought.

On entering the tent, she found that Harry was tossing and turning in his bunk, obviously caught in a nightmare. She stood over his bunk and shook him awake. It took some not inconsiderable effort to get him to wake up, but when his eyes finally shot open, he reached up and clung to her like his life depended on it—and while Hermione herself might not have been able to see it, she was truly integral to his survival in more ways than one. She sat on the side of his bed and held him for a long while, whispering in soothing tones, though she was herself more than a little frightened by the absolute terror she had seen in his eyes when he first awoke.

As he seemed to be growing calmer, she inquired gently, 'Was it…about _him_'? He shook his head, firmly but not violently, and the quietness of this assurance led her to believe that he was telling the truth. After a few more moments, he sat up more fully, and she extricated herself from his grasp. At his protest, she reassured him, 'Just going to put the kettle on. I know I need it coming in out of the storm, and you look like you need it almost as badly'. She smiled slightly at this, and he grinned back, if only briefly.

One perk of being able to use magic was the ability to almost instantaneously heat water to boiling, greatly speeding the process of making tea. Before long, she sat back next to him, the tea steeping in the pot. They sat in silence for several long minutes. Hermione finally said, 'Tea's probably ready by now'. Harry grunted in acknowledgement, but still they sat, neither making a move to pour. It was perhaps another five minutes after the tea had finished the prescribed period for steeping before Harry finally took the initiative, pouring some first into Hermione's mug and then his own. She was not particularly fond of sugar in her tea, but he carefully placed two cubes in his mug before picking it up and passing Hermione's along to her. Hermione spoke again. 'So…do you want to talk about it'?

Harry did not respond for so long that Hermione was just about to repeat the question when he finally said, 'I don't really know what to say. It was just so…strange. It wasn't about _him_, I know that much. Waking, I'm not even really sure what was so terrifying about the last part of it'. His voice trailed off.

After a relatively brief pause, she prompted him, 'What happened'?

He took a deep breath. 'It was dusk and I was walking through a park near my aunt and uncle's house in Surrey. At first it seemed perfectly normal, just me hiding from my cousin and his cohorts. But when I entered more heavily trafficked streets on my way back to the house, I noticed that there didn't seem to be anybody around. That's when I tripped over the first one. All of a sudden, the streets seemed to be littered with corpses'.

He paused a moment. 'As upsetting as that might sound, the most disturbing thing was how _little_ it fazed me. I was almost completely undeterred by the prospect of the streets filled with dead bodies'. His voice trailed off again, and Hermione shuddered at the image he described.

After a brief paused, he began again, 'At any rate, after a while slogging through these piles of corpses, I came upon my first real shock. I tripped and fell directly on top of the corpse of my mother. The _fresh_ corpse of my mother. I started and tried to turn away, when I saw my father's body, equally fresh, lying opposite her. I stood up, but could not move forward from the spot.

'And that's when my dream took its second turn for the bizarre. As I watched, every one of the corpses around me rotted away, my parents' included, in the space of perhaps thirty seconds. I looked up and around and saw that the homes and buildings around me were similarly decaying, and as I watched every trace of human habitation was erased. I continued to watch, and gradually even the trees and grass around me went through a similar process. Within perhaps five minutes, all trace of life had been wiped from the surface of the planet.

'For some time, I wandered the barren earth, and it was absolutely dead and lifeless. Though I could not see it, I felt confident that even the last microscopic organisms were dead and gone. Eventually I came upon a vast and sheer cliff-face of utter black granite. Carved into it were the words, "Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time"'.

He paused again, and Hermione muttered under her breath, '_The Physics_, 221a'. Harry looked askance at her, and she had the decency to blush. 'I'm sorry I'm like that'.

He grinned. 'Wouldn't have you any other way, Hermione. I will never cease to marvel at the sheer amount of information you can pack away and still have it available on a moment's notice. And at least most of the time'—here he smiled more broadly—'it's quite interesting'.

'Well, I'm glad _someone_ thinks so. Everyone else just thinks it's annoying. And, by extension, that I'm annoying'. Harry coughed at this interval, and his cough sounded remarkably like the name of a certain redhead of their acquaintance. 'But even if it can be interesting, I know I have a terrible habit of doing it at inappropriate times…like, for instance, now'. She smiled ruefully and motioned for him to continue his narrative.

'I won't even try to give an apology for what happened next. The cliff turned into a reflection of the sky, filled with stars that one by one blinked out. At last it was completely, utterly black. All at once, the earth and everything else around me disappeared, except for the cliff, which seemed to stretch out to infinity in all directions. I found myself flying across its surface, and I could no longer tell whether it was above me or below me or beside me, or what direction I was flying along it. For some reason, this inability to tell which direction I was moving panicked me. Suddenly, I found I had an enormous white pen in my hand, with which to mark my progress on the plane. I reached out and began plotting my journey, which gave me some comfort. But all at once, I began to move away from the plane, and although my pen grew in length so that I could still plot my progress, my markings seemed to grow smaller and smaller as I flew further and further away, until I could no longer see them at all. No matter how large my pen got or how wide I made my marks, in moments they would have disappeared from view; the plane was simply too vast for my feeble markings to mean anything at all.

'As I said, I'm not even sure why I got so panicked by all this; why should that have frightened me so? But in any case, that is when my fear reached its zenith, and the next thing I remember is you shaking me awake'.

After a few moments of reflection, Hermione spoke. 'My God…that's…horrifying! I…I don't really know what to say, except that I know I could not have taken it as well as you did. Seeing your parents decompose before your very eyes…I can't imagine. And the sheer vastness of the cliff-face'. She shivered, though by now the tea and her close proximity to another warm body had thoroughly warmed her.

Harry prompted her, 'The first part is pretty clearly nightmare material…and it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Hermione, what happens if we lose? And don't try to tell me that it's not going to happen. We both know the odds'.

'In all honesty…you're right. We will lose. Two teenagers against the entire governmental apparatus of Great Britain, backed up by a cabal of wealthy and powerful sorcerers? The truly remarkable thing is how long we've lasted. We will fail, and we will die. And so will a lot of other people, including everyone either of us cares about'. She fell silent.

After a few minutes, Harry said bitterly, 'Then why bother? If it's really so hopeless, why would we even want to try'?

'You know the answer to that one already, Harry. We don't _want_ to try. Left to our own desires, both of us would much rather flee to the other side of the planet and never think about Death Eaters or horcruxes or You-Know-Who ever again. But we don't do what we want to do. We do what we have to do. Even if we know we will fail. Perhaps especially then. "The stupid, strong, / Unteachable monsters are sure to be victorious at last, / And every man of decent blood is on the losing side"'.

After a few minutes, she shifted her thoughts, '"To every man upon this earth, / Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers, / And the temples of his Gods, / And for the tender mother / Who dandled him to rest…"' At this point, she looked more directly at him and grasped his hand reassuringly. '"And for the wife who nurses / His baby at her breast"'.

He nodded. 'But what happens then? What happens when he dies for others? Is that the end of it? Does Time wither him away to nothing until he is forgotten? Is that what's going to happen to you and me in the coming days when we get caught and killed'?

She thought for a moment. Finally, she answered, her voice absolutely matter-of-fact, 'Possibly. Maybe even probably. I don't believe so, but that doesn't particularly matter. It is absolutely possible, even probable, that all we are is a peculiar form of self-replicating mud, the product of a Cosmos that did not notice our birth and will not notice our extinction. A Cosmos that will exist long after even the stars are dead and gone, as in your dream. But, to me, that only reinforces the necessity of service and duty, for under such a scheme, the absolute highest we can aim for is noble life and noble death'.

He nodded slowly. 'That makes sense, I suppose. But what about that last part? Why on earth does the insufficiency of my pen bother me'? Realising what he had just said, Harry blushed slightly, and after a few moments of slightly uncomfortable silence, both Harry and Hermione burst out laughing.

It took them several minutes to get control of themselves again, but after she had calmed down, Hermione did her best to answer. 'Well…setting aside the Freudian implications…' This set both of them off giggling once again, and it was several more minutes before they could take themselves seriously again.

'As I said, setting that aside… "What we all dread most is a maze with no centre". The most absolutely horrifying thing in human experience is being lost. There are, to be sure, far more terrifying things—wild animals and artillery shells come to mind—but those induce terror, not fear. Terror is a function of the animal: the fox who has been trapped, the fish that finds itself on dry land, the sheep faced with a wolf, all feel terror. Fear, though, is an inherently rational impulse. No animal has ever been afraid. And the one thing that we humans fear above all others is being lost and being unable to find ourselves.

'That's why the cliff-face was so horrible. No matter how hard you tried, you could never find or make a reference point with which to find yourself. Lost in a maze with no centre. And many have the nagging suspicion that the Cosmos is every bit as infinitely vast and infinitely blank as the plane that you described. And on the face of something so vast and so blank, what hope have mere mortals to make a marking that can be of even the slightest use to a navigator'?

At this interval, Harry observed, 'Not doing the best job of comforting me here, Hermione'.

She smiled. 'But there's a way to cheat. Did you ever work with Cartesian graphs in school? Before Hogwarts, obviously'.

'Not in school, but I picked up a few things here and there—a lot from you, actually'.

'Well, the Cartesian coordinate plane is every bit as vast and every bit as blank as the Cosmos of the nihilists. But work can and is still done on it. By inserting _infinite_ reference points. No matter how big your mark is on the surface of the plane, it will be absolutely useless unless it is literally infinite. And that's how we can cheat the nihilistic problem: other people. Personality—no, that's not the right word—_personhood_ is the infinite reference point we require. That's why "the wife who nurses / His baby at her breast" is so important. Together, we can face anything, even the blankness of infinity and the blackness of oblivion'.

He nodded. Now he understood. Hopelessness can be faced 'where two or more are gathered'. But were two or more gathered? The expression on his face betrayed him, and she cut him off before he could say a word, 'Harry, do you really need to ask? I think I've made it fairly clear by this time…anything and anyone that asks me to choose between him or her or it and you is going to be disappointed. No one will ever be as close to me as you are…and I have just enough arrogance in me to wager that no one will ever be as close to you as I am'.

After a few moments, she completed her thought, 'Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia'.

Harry raised his eyebrows. He thought for a moment before committing himself. 'Until death do us part'.

They hugged tightly, and just as they were pulling apart, he planted a kiss on her forehead. It was a dark and stormy night, and outside the wind blew all the colder, but inside the tent, it could not touch them: an island of brightness in utter darkness.


End file.
